Reviews

My boyfriend and I visited the Orange Room after having heard some positive feedback from friends. Sad to say we were very dissapointed. We started with drinks, glass of red sangria for me, beer for the bf. The sangria was probably the worst sangria I have ever had yet before I ordered it the server had said it was fantastic. If you have ever had real sangria, you know it should be full of fruit, good red wine with a little hit of brandy. What I received looked like kool-aid with one orange slice in it. It tasted awful with a hard chemical taste- must have been some type of mix. I asked for lemon and lime wedges to dampen the taste yet it was still a loss.

For dinner I had the salmon quiche and seafood fettucine for my bf. My dinner was OK- the caesar salad had mandarin orange slices in it (weird) and the quiche was oily on top as it was obviously pre-baked and then re-heated somehow (my guess is microwave). My boyfriend's dinner was down right awful. The pasta was over cooked mush, drowned in a creamy, cheesey, oil slicked sauce and the seafood (the little there was) was not properly cooked. One of the mussles had barely opened, tell tale sign that it was bad, however it was seved to him anyway!

The servers were friendly enough, yet were not overly concerned that we were not having a nice meal.

The ambiance is cold, with awkward tables and chairs that did not look clean or inviting.

Needless to say we will not be returning, which is sad, seeing we were looking forward to having a nice restaurant close to our house!

Three of us decided to try Joey's on Burrard this evening for dinner. We arrived at 6:00 PM and the restaurant looked really busy. The hostess let us know there was a wait of 25 minutes. I thought that was probably and over estimate, so we decided to wait. Less than 5 minutes later we were seated in the "wine bar" portion of the restaurant. The host seemed a little confused as we were brought to a table for two when there were three in our party. Lucky for us a table just needed to be cleaned in order for us to be sat at a nice booth. The lighting is very dark and the music super loud (rock, heavy guitar type music). I could hear people shouting at each other from different tables because they needed to talk over the music.

We waited quite a few minutes before we were presented with food menus and then immediately were asked for our drink order. As I had looked at a drink menu during our brief wait in the lobby I knew I wanted a specific drink. When I forgot the name, I mentioned it had lemon in the title. Our very young, very immature server scoffed and said that she couldn't possibly know which one I was talking about and just stared at me (didn't offer to get a drink menu or anything). It finally came to me and off she went. I was disapointed to look around and see the server clones from Cactus Club and Earl's. Short skirts, high heels and low cut shirts everywhere. I'm not sure why restaurants think that a good looking person automatically makes for a good server...does knowledge and personality count for nothing?

Anyway, dinner was the absolute highlight for me. I had the delicious salmon salad which is a throw back to classic French nicoise and was awesome, but a tiny bit over dressed. My friends had another salad, the sliders and wings which they said were also good. For dessert we shared a chocolate souffle which was to die for. We enquired about the price of lattes and received another scoff from our server who at this point was not winning any brownie points.

Despite our server, we had a great evening with good food. I would suggest this restaurant to people wanting to be a part of a lively, loud dining experience, not wanting intimate conversation.